For those interested in Jewish culinary heritage, award-winning cookbook author and regular New York Times contributor Joan Nathan is one of the ultimate sources — and she’ll be in town Thursday to promote her 10th cookbook, “Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France.”

Although Nathan splits her time between Washington, D.C., and Martha’s Vineyard, she grew up mostly in New York and her connections to Vermont run deep. Back to the 1950s: Camp Kiniya in Colchester in the summer; skiing at Stowe and staying at The Round Hearth in winter; attending horse shows along Vermont 7 and eating Seward’s ice cream in Rutland.

Her editor at Knopf, the legendary Judith Jones, spends summers in the Northeast Kingdom and Nathan has also visited her there frequently.

“I have a fondness for Vermont in my heart,” she said earlier this week over the phone. “Next to Martha’s Vineyard, Vermont is my favorite place.”

France has also long been one of her favorite places, she said, since she was sent there as a teenager to learn French. However, it was not initially an obvious source for a Jewish cookbook.

“I always thought French. I never thought Jewish,” she said, referring to the food of France. “But I went there sort of on a mission to see if there was a book there and I kept uncovering so much.”

“They’re reticent, the French. If you don’t mention it, they won’t mention it,” Nathan explained. “But people are opening up.”

To her surprise, Nathan learned that France has the third largest Jewish population in the world (after Israel and the United States) and, over four years of research trips, she discovered rich culinary traditions from kosher foie gras to an Alsatian pear kugel with prunes, which she promises will make a kugel-lover out of anyone.

Interwoven with the recipes are stories of cooks and chefs, butchers and bakers: the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, who shared her grandmother’s North African tomato, pepper and eggplant salad recipe after Nathan noticed she was wearing a necklace with a Jewish symbol on it; and the wife of a Parisian butcher, who continues preparing the Polish-style chopped liver she grew up with after her parents restarted their post-war lives in France.

“It’s all about good stories and connections,” Nathan said. “I think that food is so much more than food.”